#Jobs

These are the ten vehicles that NHTSA says are made from 90 percent domestically-produced components [via cars.com]. Notice a common thread there? Yes, the correct answer is Ford involvement, but according to cars.com, the task of crowning a “king of domestic content” isn’t as simple as NHTSA’s number.

With a GM IPO in the fourth quarter of this year looking more likely than ever, GM has revealed just how much its top management stands to gain from the automaker’s post-bailout share offering. Based on trading of Motors Liquidation bonds, which GM will convert into stock and warrants, a JP Morgan Chase report pegs the company’s value at $70b. Based on yesterday’s bond trading prices, however, BusinessWeek estimates new GM’s value at $48b. With a float of 500m shares planned, that puts GM’s current stock price at about $96/share. With that in mind, let’s take a quick look at GM’s planned executive stock compensation.

Throughout the bailout bonanza, we were told that the car industry means million of jobs. True enough, before the money was doled out, we learned that auto-related industries employ 3.1 million people around the country. Now, the government is paying big bucks for electric car development. From Tesla all the way to Nissan, the industry is getting $ 25 billions of DOE loans, conditional on the development of advanced vehicle technologies. Which usually means electric cars. What’s wrong with that picture? If successful, it could cost a big chunk of those 3.1 million jobs.

In Japan, the land of the mythical lifetime employment, peaks and valleys in demand are managed with temporary workers. As long as work is there, they work. If demand dries up: “So sorry, your temporary time is up. Ja ne!” During carmageddon times, most if not all of the temporary workers in Japan had been sent home – often to no home at all. The hiring of temporary workers is a closely watched leading indicator in Japan, signaling an uptake in business. The Nikkei [sub] reports that Toyota companies are hiring contract workers again as production is picking up.

Ford is in-sourcing important parts of their hybrid-electric vehicles, and they are putting $135m behind the effort to bring the parts home and in-house. Currently, core parts are made abroad. Moving the making home to Michigan will create a whopping 170 jobs in Rawsonville and Van Dyke. But it’s a start. “I am proud of the tremendous success of the UAW and Ford in working together to keep good manufacturing jobs in the U.S.,” said Bob King, UAW vice president, National Ford Department.

Opel has received a new lease on life. Nobody knows how long the lease will last, but Opel is an important step ahead and gained an even more important ally in its beggathon for state aid. Opel cut a deal with its unions, led by labor leader Klaus Franz.

“For much of the past year, Klaus Franz has been a thorn in General Motors Co.’s side,” wrote the Wall Street Journal. Franz “has blamed the European car unit’s troubles on its American parent, saying GM was ‘filled with yes-men’ and that it had a ‘centralized planning system worse than in East Germany.’ Now, GM needs to make nice with Mr. Franz.” With their backs to the wall, GM finally paid the price and made nice.

Ultimate Factories – Ferrari

Bloomberg reports that Ferrari workers walked off the job for four hours yesterday, in protest of planned job cuts and production idling. Ferrari has announced that it plans to eliminate 120 office jobs and 150 production jobs, or nearly ten percent of its workforce. The Italian sportscar firm has also said it will put 600 workers on a week-long furlough next week, as it idles production of engines for its sister brand Maserati at a Maranello plant. Last year, Ferrari built about 4,500 engines for Maserati, about half of the 2008 number, as sales of the brand fell.

Speaking at the same Detroit conference on the auto bailout that Steve Rattner and Ron Bloom attended, the Center for Automotive Research’s Sean McAlinden proclaimed the end of Detroit’s era of unsustainable high wages. In 2007, said McAlinden, building a car in North America cost GM about $1,400 more per car than it did Toyota, thanks largely to a $950 health care charge. Since then, GM’s bailout and renegotiated wage and benefit contracts with the union have actually brought GM’s hourly compensation to just under what the CAR says the transplants pay. The AP reports that McAlinden’s estimate of GM’s average hourly worker salary is $69,368 while the transplant average is $70,185. Better still is McAlinden’s prediction that

between 2013 and 2015, Toyota could even be paying $10 more per hour than GM unless the Japanese company reacts and lowers wages.

And all it took was giving the UAW a $17.5 stake in the new GM!

Unheard-of news are emanating from Rüsselsheim. So unheard-of that Automobilwoche found it necessary to send out an Extra! Extra! Lesen Sie all about it e-mail to its subscribers: GM’s Opel, the very same company that wants to shed 8,000 of its 48,000 jobs in Europe, is short of people. They are hiring! One reason: Jobs are being exported from the U.S.A. to Europe.

Opels head shop steward Klaus Franz is mightily mad at Opel’s CEO Nick Reilly. Reilly told the London Times that the Ampera, Opel’s counterpart to the Volt, may be built in the Ellesmere Port plant in the UK:“The chances are quite good that the Ampera will come to Ellesmere Port as it is close in production terms to the Astra and will share many components,” Reilly said. In the meantime, Berlin cues Roberta Flack’s “Killing me softly” as a prelude for Opel’s funeral.

Media from Associated Press to The Business Standard of India are abuzz with reports that Fiat (the company) is planning to cut 5000 jobs and will be spinning off its car division this summer. The stock market seems to like the idea: Fiat’s shares rose 4.15 percent.

Workers at the former Toyota-GM joint venture NUMMI have approved a severance offer from Toyota. Union officials won’t reveal the exact amount involved, and while the Detroit Free Press reports that workers will make a “minimum” of $21,175, the San Jose Mercury says the deal “gives an average severance package of $54,000.” Could it be that some union brothers are more equal than others? What the Freep leaves out is that $21,175 minimum applies to 300 of NUMMI’s 4,700 workers who are already on disability leave. Workers with over 25 years of experience will receive $68,500.

The Detroit News reports that the United Auto Workers are gearing up for battle for a surprising new cause: greenhouse gas emissions standards. Alan Reuther, Legislative Director of the newly-green union, wrote congress recently to warn against a bill authored by Sen. Lisa Murkowski which would prevent the EPA from declaring C02 a danger to public health, saying:

The UAW also is deeply concerned that overturning EPA’s endangerment finding would unravel the historic agreement on one national standard for fuel economy and greenhouse gas emissions for light-duty vehicles that was negotiated by the Obama administration last year